All the Fierce Tethers: Essays

OF PRAYER

It was a quilt of the kind I know to be in most American hotel rooms—synthetic and scratchy on the underside where little pills gather from rubbing, and snags from jewelry make a web of lines. Time marks blankets and towels with thin spots, blinds with frayed slats, toilet seats with chips. Rust stains a sink, and water a nightstand. Quilts of this kind withstand a lot—our antics and rest, much shaking and straightening, rough cleaning—all evidence of the passage of days and nights.

It was early spring, but likely the AC in the room was on. He’d have thought of the sound as muffling, a small calculation any mind would make.

Mine would.

I’d think of that.

Maybe he fixed on the single word muffle and repeated it a few, then too many times. Any word, under strain, will collapse into garble.

There’s a store manager in this, too, you might recognize. Imagine him at the new Crate & Barrel, a few blocks from the hotel. Just hired, proud of his clean and bright unit, a “step lively and much can be yours” kind of guy, with promise and smarts. Here, when you buy a knife, they wrap it securely in sturdy paper, which indicates they run a safe ship, no bows or gift wrap for the cutlery. They seal such things with a wide strip of tape and let it be your problem undoing it at home. How could he know, the manager-taper, that he had his hands on something terribly wrong? That another hand, one he just touched—showing the balance of hilt and blade, passing the pen to sign the receipt—would act in ways so unthinkable that he himself might feel implicated? Sometimes I touch my dollar bills, especially the fifties, and consider all the bribes they sealed, drugs they scored, and run in my head tests on the microbes, stories, economies I’m passing along in the purchase of onions, sliced turkey, and cheese.

Likely the manager asked a question, a simple one—“Is this a present?” And perhaps his customer said “Yes, it is” very fast, to throw the manager off the trail. And maybe that there was a trail, that he himself was still constructing it, became clear for the customer precisely then, and for the first time. It’s possible, too, that such a trail might have been shifted by the simplest statement, the way a weatherman might transform a gray morning by saying “a beautiful light rain is falling on the city.” Just the other day I was grateful to have my mood shifted once the beauty of rain was suggested. Whole strings of decisions could’ve been altered, the more instructions a chatty manager gave at the register, if he was good at building relations—as in “be careful with this, it’s wrapped well for now, but if you intend to post it or gift it …” (The verbing alone might have startled the buyer: How weird: to gift! How archaic: to post! And “to wash this knife …” alone might have done it.) The more time shared at the register, where one man was working the hip/bright store, and the other planning the murder of his family, the more some internal diffusion of light, a breaking of clouds, a breakthrough, a breakdown, a falling-to-knees-and-trembling sort of scene, a right and good rending in the name of healing, like breaking to reset a bone—might have halted things. I’d like to believe that more chat, the right words, the weight of them, would’ve shoved a wedge in and filled the hole in the air before him—emptiness in the chest, rent in the logic—where instead more unthinkable acts firmed up.

It’s a quilt with a busy gray and brown pattern, dark-toned to hide stains you very much don’t want to think of—from, say, couples not-waiting and tearing into each other, spilled drinks, muddy shoes.

The quilt, rolled and kicked. Bunched on the floor. Dampened. Stepped on.

Trampled, balled, twisted.

That quilt.

There it was. That’s what I saw on this brisk, fall day. It came unbidden, the way so many things, as I’m walking, come in—on stippled light (or gray light, or very bright sun), landing and piercing.

In its place, I tried to install quilts I’ve made. Three altogether. One for a boy who cared nothing about quilts, which my mother watched me make as I listened over and over to Jesus Christ Superstar for weeks one summer. Fervently, I’d say, singing into the belief of others but not, myself, possessing anything like their strain of it. The second one was for a friend who appreciated it greatly and who gave more to me than I could accept at the time. And the last I made for myself. I still have it, pieced mostly from little-kid dresses, kerchiefs, and smocks my mother made. I recall with ease, by way of these colors (summer-sky, corn-yellow), an old atmosphere: deep snowy mornings when I’d stand on a chair and look out the kitchen window a long while. The trees at the front of the house were just planted, and because I was young, too, we understood each other. The quiet hummed. It was before the world was up, my box turtle crawled around in his tank, and the far-off flagpole in the park was a very dark gray against the brighter, snow-packed sky. I came to understand distance then, by feeling the plot of a day hovering and the space where I stood, a central point. By being still, I could collect what the day was trying to say.

Thus, I let the ruined quilt come in.

I locate the pockets and dips, deep valleys for terrible pools and rivers; in patterns, streams swell, spill, and seep. I let the puddles turn rusty in air.

To be in the business of letting the blood come.

We each have our fields. The word field is capacious—a place to be turned, planted, gathered from. Field of light, of inquiry, of—and here I’m getting closer—battle. One man’s, with his soul, and he lost very completely.

Explanations fail.

Plenty don’t murder who you’d expect might.

A man with no hope acts like a knife. Failed financial schemes act like a knife. A sham is a knife. Shame is a knife. Fear, a knife that cuts a caul of darkness out and hangs it over all of us, like—once I saw in a restorer’s hands—a sheet of gold leaf lifted on the edge of a blade, struck up like a flame, and laid over the hem of a wooden saint, then rubbed to a shine. But this knife held no light at all. Knife like a drowning. Quilt like a vessel, mop, body bag, grave. Snarled. Fretted. Bogged. Consigned and corrupted. He’d brought his wife and younger daughter to visit the older daughter at college. She went that afternoon to the hotel, and when it got late and she hadn’t returned, her roommates called. Her father answered and said not to worry, she was going to spend the night with the family. At which point, he’d already killed them all. Soon after that, he turned the knife on himself.

The girl went to the university where I teach. She was, as I learned, much loved by her friends. She was kind and had plans, exams, parties upcoming.

A bed. A wardrobe. Pencils. Soap. Socks.

The day after the tragedy, when the story broke, we heard the breaking. Hearing it made the sun incongruous. Made me try to say something into the warmth it kept giving—poor sun, always shining on everyone, brightening all events in its path. In one of my very best classes (where soon, at the end of the semester, one student was heading to China, one into the army, one to teach at a city school) what I said about the tragedy wasn’t nothing—it was just the best I could do. Given my limits. Since I hadn’t a practice. Which was better than nothing, but still weighed very little. I said something like: Though you might not have known her, she was part of your day. A presence you passed as you crossed the quad, a laugh you heard and took in, and in that way, she colored your stubborn loneliness. She brushed crumbs off the table before you sat down. She exhaled as she passed and air held the breath you drew into your body. You caught her cold. You swallowed her sigh. You picked up the penny she dropped, thinking “hey, lucky penny.” And just as she gave proof to your day, you gave hers shape, maybe lit her afternoon with your colors, voice, presence.

The quilt reddened. The quilt twisted and fell. The funerals were separate, the girls with their mother, the father apart, and, yes, people did attend his. How would he feel, I remember thinking, floating above his body (where, for the sake of this thought, I put him) seeing what the mourners made, best they could, of the wreckage he caused. How they forced the persistence of some goodness to live. Made themselves hold opposing forces, admit there was good, there had been in him, and allowed that mystery to compel them to come. Or they were obliged because family, and that’s what you do.

All loss is weighted with disbelief. All homage seeks to make something to keep, to make loss mean, to give the fissile core of grief shape. The quilt bore the weight of the act, of the bodies; and since such fabric isn’t absorbent, it must’ve made channels, and there the blood pooled. There were runnels. And chambers.

Words very like muffling kept coming: fleet, shocking, precise, and unspoken.

And what did they say?

I asked a few of them this fall, now a year and a half later, if they remembered that moment and what they were thinking. One said she created a silence around herself and asked, she didn’t know who, the force she was used to calling “God,” for comfort and healing on the family’s behalf. Another with no go-to prayer either recalled the sensation of bowing her head with everyone. I told her I feared that I, alone, had no prayer. She said she’d always suspected we bow our heads to hide our faces, to keep from each other how ashamed we feel in the face of grief. For another, the Prayer for the Faithful Departed came first, and then a rush of fear: My father was also out of work then, she said, and things were bad. If no one in her family saw it coming … what kept us from being them? The last one I asked—I think of him as especially adept at matters of the spirit—didn’t recall what he thought or prayed. But he said that after her death (they were friends) nothing was the same. One day he was a kid, working, hanging out, and the next, everything changed. And when another classmate died soon after, and he found himself repeating the steps—go to the Mass, go to the grave—that shook him: the familiarity. After that, he no longer wondered how adults always seemed to know what to do.

Why does she come back now, in fall?

I’m on the same path I take every day. I had no intention of recalling her—but stories lay themselves over the land. Leaves-losing-color, then trees-losing-leaves—that’s an old one: Demeter’s loss of Persephone.

Any land looks like death when the blooming’s done and nothing’s green for months on end.

One naturally mourns a girl in fall—though I have no fixed date for calling her back. Nothing like All Souls’ Day, when, ten years ago now, my own friend jumped to her death. It was a bitter October in Warsaw, and climbing the stairs to the top of the building, sensible as she was, she probably wore her big coat. Why, though? Why, at the end, bother? And the heavy door to the roof—why wasn’t it locked? (Though we used to go up there all the time, the city sky finally vast in the dark, the tram a bright river, the apartment blocks like hunched, far-off mountains if you squinted and undid the chimneys.) Was there a moment the wind calmed and she paused, looked at her shoes, thought Those are my shoes and I laced them this morning?

Every year since, each thirty-first of October, a new piece of that scene fills in, makes a bid for inclusion. As if remembering better might bring some ease, and precision upend disbelief. Once it was the single step up to the building’s edge. Another time, that old twig broom and dented ash can. In other years, lines of tar sealing cracks in the roof; a silver bucket with frozen washrags; the wobbly handrail; the switch plate’s stiff toggle on the wall at the foot of the stairwell.

One year, no scene formed (that was a dark time) and the cold itself had to suffice.

This year it was a scent that came—the hallway’s mix of cigarette smoke, stew meat, wet boots, and coal. When the smell dissipated, the actual things—cigarettes, boots, and black dust over everything—remained. Insisted. Asserted. Oh strange and constant spring.